Product Configuration

Article ID: 153

Last updated: 04 May, 2023

For examples and details on how to create IVR services, please read the Advanced Queuing and Auto Attendant User Guide.

This section focuses on some technical details, which the Administrators should know to understand the application behavior better.

User permissions

To create or modify an IVR service, you must be an Administrator (Complete Management). This will give you full control over the application.
You can set user permissions form the Admin ⇒ User Management page.

Adding a new IVR service

You can add a new IVR service from the Services web page, by clicking on “Add a new IVR service”. The service can be created via a Wizard or starting from a template.
The IVR Service name and the Pilot number must be unique for the whole system. Since Advanced Queuing and Auto Attendant are sharing same SIP Trunk, the number and the name must be also different from ACD queue names and numbers.
Usually you define one IVR service (with one pilot number) for each site in your organization, or for each PSTN public number.

For complex scenarios, you can define more than one IVR service and cascade them, transferring the call from the first service to the other services pilot numbers.

Behaviors and the Main Behavior

Behaviors define how the call is treated after being answered. Behaviors can play audio files, wait for DTMF tones, drop or transfer the calls, and so on.
The first behavior you add to the service becomes the Main Behavior that will be executed when the call is answered.

The following behaviors are available:

Transfer to

All AutoAttendant call transfers are blind type. They fail instantly if the destination is invalid or cannot be reached. In this case, the caller hears no ringback.
If the destination can be reached, the caller hears the ringback tone from the Calling Platform.

For each transfer you can define a message to be played before initiating the transfer, the number of retries, and messages to be played in case of failure.
After the retries are exceeded, you can choose to drop the call or trigger an existing behavior.

If the Calling Platform in use allows it, the call can be transferred to internal numbers/SIP URI, to a third-party answering groups or ACD, to a voice mail system or to any PSTN number.

Play message

This behaviour allows to simply play a voice prompts, previously created in MP3 or WAV format and uploaded from web portal.

Dial in

Dial-in behavior allows caller party to enter the digit of the internal number/extension to be connected to. You can define the minimum and maximum number of digits to be collected, a timeout, and if the caller must press # to terminate digits collection.

Conversational IVR

This behaviour allows to trigger a VoiceBOT script created in Conversational AI (relevant license required). Please remember that interacting with Cloud-based Imagicle ConvAI application might require to setup a new web server URL, as explained here.

Audio prompts

You can easily add and audio prompt by clicking on the textbox close to the message label. It is a best practice to add the transcript of the text pronounced in the audio file.
Audio files can be recorded in .MP3 or Wav formats, and they will be automatically converted to PCM 8Kz 16-bit mono.

To check the audio prompt quality after conversion, save the behavior, then click on the play icon, then on the download icon. Play the file locally on your PC.

All the audio messages are optional.
To delete the message, click on the trash icon.

Note: please download and backup any audio file before removing it from an existing IVR service, because it will be deleted from the server.

Scheduling behaviors

The timetable allows you to change the behavior associated to a pilot number based on the date and time when the call arrives to the IVR.

For example, you could define a “day” behavior and a “night” behavior. Select the Night behavior as default, pressing the “Outside of defined schedules, execute the following behavior” button on the bottom of the timetable.
Then add a new scheduled behavior for the working hours, selecting the “day” behavior.

The holiday and special events allows you to override the normal schedule, executing different behaviors.

IVR Managers

When you edit an existing IVR Service as administrator, you can assign one or more IVR Managers from "Permissions" tab.

Each IVR Manager associated to an IVR Service has the following capabilities:

Change overflow treatment
Edit Auto Attendant behaviors and relevant voice prompts
Amend weekly timetable, by choosing opening/closing time
Configure holidays
Add mode IVR Managers
Run Auto Attendant reports, except "Busy Channels"

Modifying an existing IVR service

You can safely edit any an existing IVR service without the need to restart the service. If you make changes, calls currently connected to the IVR service will retain the old behavior. The changes apply to new calls.

Other IVR service settings

When you edit an existing IVR service, you can define an additional behavior, which is triggered when the maximum number of concurrent calls is exceeded (“overflow”). To understand how Auto Attendant license relates to Advanced Queuing licensed channels, please read the “License Activation” page in this guide.

You can also define a default timeout for DTMF selection.

Data Retention

From IVR "Settings" tab, it is possible to specify maximum lifetime (in days) of historical data. That is, older data will be periodically deleted. Set it to zero (0) to disable automatic deletion. Please, notice that this setting may impact on the database size.

Starting the service

Since Advanced Queuing and Auto Attendant share the same service, you can start and stop the service from Advanced Queuing's Manage Service page. Stopping Advanced Queuing service stops all the queues, as well as all IVR services.